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What We Are Doing Now: History and Geography

We continue along on our own path for learning American History. I am not following a curriculum for this, because I could not find one that I liked that covered everything that I wanted to cover in chronological order and that was age appropriate at the same time.

Madison really enjoyed making the crafts that were in this book. Among them, her favorites were clay mud bricks and a homemade broom. She did them entirely on her own during the time we were reading the book.

For Geography, we are focusing on the United States by using Little Passports. The USA Edition of Little Passports is great. The World Edition, not so much. We use Top Secret from Highlights to study countries.

Madison has been studying one state per week. She reads about the state from two books. First, from Smart About the Fifty States by Jon Buller and second, from Don’t Know Much About the 50 States by Kenneth C. Davis. After she reads out of the books, she opens up her packet from Little Passports and reads the letter that is in the beginning of her packet. She places the pushpin sticker on the capital on the map on the wall that came with the Little Passports welcome packet. She places stickers of of the state flag, bird, seal, etc. on her field journal.

Then we pull out a huge wall map I purchased on Zulily and she colors in the state, labels it, and labels the capital. Throughout the week she does the activity pages in the packet and then at the end of the week she fills in the field notes in her field journal. She has actually memorized all of the capitals of the states we have done so far on her own this way.

So far she has completed the Northeastern States including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Maryland. Madison has started on the Southeastern states and has completed Arkansas.

We were ‘cooking our way’ through the states, but we are trying to eat healthy and limit sugar, and the two were not compatible, so that didn’t work out and we stopped.